RIPTON — In his first reading since being named as the nation's 2011-2012 poet laureate, Philip Levine took his audience to plane trees leafing out in the Barcelona spring, a California fig orchard scented with sea air, one of Billie Holiday's final concerts and his own dreams.

The tour stopped at mortality, eternity and a slow dance in Havana with a woman wearing "black hair in a wiry tangle." Levine, 83, made jokes, talked about his life and read poems solemn and not-so-solemn Thursday to an audience of more than 250 people at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

The audience gave him a standing ovation before he read a single line, a gesture that seemed to pierce the irreverent fašade Levine displayed for much of the afternoon and reveal a bit of raw feeling that the poet checked by looking down for a few seconds.

Or maybe he just wanted to make sure his shoes were tied.

That's the explanation one would expect Levine to offer, perhaps, after observing a performance that cast the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner as unpretentious, deeply insightful and a bit of a rabble rouser. He repeatedly poked fun at Library of Congress officials who want him to declare what his "project" will be as poet laureate. "I suggested this anthology of the ugliest poems, " he said dryly. "That was rejected."

The Detroit-born poet of Russian Jewish immigrants worked the auto assembly line as a young man and taught for decades at California State in Fresno — "which is not the California you see in the movies, unless you like biker movies," Levine explained.

Librarian of Congress James Billington announced Levine's appointment Aug. 10 and hailed him as a great narrative poet whose plain spoken lyricism and powerful truths help people make sense of their lives. Levine, who will take up his duties this fall, indicated that the press whirlwind since the announcement is testing his public relations skills. "The more I talk, the more I lie," he said to the crowd. "And I've lied so much in the last few days."

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Thursday's reading in the small theater at Bread Loaf was packed, with people overflowing out doors opening onto an exquisite Vermont summer view — the Green Mountains, blue sky and puffy white clouds. Inside was even better, though. "It was electric in there," said Sarah Woodberry, a Bread Loaf fiction student from Darien, Conn.

Levine has a zeal for life that comes out in his poems, she said. Another mark of his talent? Nobody dozed off - despite the heat and late afternoon time slot for the reading, factors that have made it difficult to stay fully alert at some of the other readings at Bread Loaf this summer. "Not every day have we all been able to stay awake," Woodberry confessed.

The Levine reading was fabulous, said Melissa Stein, a poetry fellow at Bread Loaf. She admires Levine's use of the specific to evoke the universal, not to mention his stage presence. "He's hilarious for one, thing," she said. "He's really got the patter down."

The reading was booked months ago and it was happy coincidence that it arrived just after the poet laureate announcement. Levine taught at Bread Loaf in the mid 1980s and the return to the mountaintop writer's haven was a reunion of sorts, attended by familiar Vermont faces including novelist Julia Alvarez and former U.S. poet laureate Louise Gluck, among others.

Levine read poems including "New Year's Eve, In Hospital," "Songs," "Burial Rites," "Ode For Mrs. William Settle" and "Storms." The latter, from the 2004 collection "Breath," relates the experience of being visited in a dream by a beloved person who has died, and then losing that person all over again upon waking. Levine explained that the poem was "about trying to cope with a death of someone you really love, and they go." Saying goodbye doesn't get any easier, he told the audience. "You never learn how to do it."

He spoke about many friends gone now, including the writer Grace Paley, of Vermont and New York, and remembered her as a soul and a wit who once deadpanned: "Everything changes. Except the avant garde."

He shared drinking stories, read poems that took the audience from Detroit, to Brooklyn and to his mother's ashes, buried in his wife's garden in Fresno next to a lilac shrub.

Afterwards a line formed at a table and Levine did what writers do - signed books and shared more stories. He re-iterated that he's not sure what his signature project will be as poet laureate and said he won't be hurried, even by the Library of Congress.